Welcome to GameDevBlog. This is my new blogging home.
I'm Jamie Fristrom, and I've been blogging about game development for two years now. (This was my first article ever...not counting ones for Game Developer and GamaSutra) I was the lead programmer on Treyarch's Spider-Man and I was both a lead programmer and a designer on Spider-Man 2. (Coming to a retail outlet near you in July.) I have a long history with the industry dating back to 1991, when I graduated from UCSD with a degree in psychology of all things and got my first job at MindCraft working on the Magic Candle series.
I'm also a columnist for GamaSutra, where I write my "Manager In A Strange Land" series of articles about managing game development.
Some friends of mine and I decided to start blogging together last year, and this was the result: GameDevLeague. Three things happened:
- readership shot up
- after a while, I was the only one who blogged anymore
- everybody complained about the lame comments section
So GameDevBlog is GameDevLeague II. Spawn of GameDevLeague. I'm not sure if it's a sequel or a line extension.
Things I like to talk about include: software engineering (although I'm interested more in the fuzzy touchy-feely "human" side of getting code written than the actual nuts and bolts "check out this cool optimization" side), management (although I've been saving most of that for the column), design (and I regularly post notes I take while playing other games), and marketing (although I really have very little experience in this area I like to spout off on it.)
Everything but art, basically. (I'm one of those guys who, when an artist tells me that something looks bad I stare at it for a while and say, "Looks fine to me. What's wrong with it?")
What do you think of the new digs? I think it looks pretty cool, but like I said, I'm one of those guys.
Actual post with content should be coming soon.
This is me, testing the comments. The biggest complaint with the old blog was the comments. So that was the number one feature I was looking for in a new blog system. The first thing I looked at was Joel Spolsky's CityDesk, because he's one of my heroes. He has comments on his site so I assumed his software supported them. It doesn't. Which surprises me: he's written articles endorsing bloatware, and articles endorsing subscription based software, and here's this product -- TypePad -- that has CityDesk beat in both areas. Or maybe CityDesk does something cool that I don't know about.
Posted by: Jamie Fristrom | February 25, 2004 at 04:18 PM
Great. Now where am I supposed to not post?
Posted by: Mark Nau | March 01, 2004 at 09:10 PM
The colors are 10x better. The comment system seems simple, perfect. No popup windows on stuff.
Now, stop crunching and get posting.
Posted by: Martin Donlon | March 01, 2004 at 09:36 PM
Yeah, post already. Sheesh man. Get your priorites... crooked.
But yeah, dig the stylee and such.
Posted by: Jeffool | March 01, 2004 at 10:07 PM
Do you want an honorary membership so you can not post here? You can always continue not to post at the last one...
Posted by: Jamie Fristrom | March 01, 2004 at 11:19 PM
great sight! MIASL is not enough. more posting about coping through the tortures of gamedev managerial practices plz! maybe more about the scheduling and structuring of a chaotic design process. thx
BTW after reviewing master-joel's fogbugz, we found we did not like it as much as our previous bugtracking software. wonder if it had something cool that we overlooked.
Posted by: FedEx | March 02, 2004 at 12:35 AM
I like it. It's definitely a big improvement, although I'm getting some unintended formatting behavior: the sidebar extends up into the titlebar (I've noticed this on memorycard.blogs.com, too), and there's a haphazard separating line. Here's a pic.
Also, I'm not too big a fan of the large Verdana font, and I think the sidebar could use less line-spacing.
I'll second Martin on the colors.
Posted by: Walter | March 02, 2004 at 03:23 AM
Whoops, here's the URL to the pic, as the link got stripped out of my previous post:
http://www.ludonauts.com/gamedevblog.gif
Posted by: Walter | March 02, 2004 at 03:24 AM
Yay! You're back.
Posted by: Raph | March 02, 2004 at 10:15 AM
Ahhhh.... Much better comments section. ;-)
Posted by: Scott Miller | March 02, 2004 at 11:13 AM
I'll take you up on the honorary position so I can fail to post.
It's funny, first I got busy, then I got lazy, then it was Jamie's blog and I didn't want to intrude. Better this way, but if you want a guest blogger on rare occasion, I don't mind.
Posted by: Chris Busse | March 02, 2004 at 12:29 PM
Oh yeah, I'll chime in on your first blog too. So, is sound so beneath you notice of game dev that you neither include it as something you will talk about nor exclude it as in-bounds?
Sound in games: A table stands great on three legs, so why do we mostly use four?
Posted by: Chris Busse | March 02, 2004 at 12:30 PM
>Chris Busse
>Sound in games: A table stands great on three legs, so why do we mostly use four?
Funny, I thought story was the fourth leg? Or are games so advanced they have many extra legs?
Posted by: Jeffool | March 02, 2004 at 10:42 PM
Woo hoo! Now I can post off topic replies and not feel unduly impeded in the process!
Joyfulness.
Oh, and Jamie - have you ever thought about collecting or collating any of your posts and observations and putting them somewhere more accessible or searchable? There have been quite a few times that I've wanted to refer someone to your blogs specifically to look at some of your game mechanic analysis (like your PoP notes, or your Deus Ex notes, or you Zelda:OoT notes), and... well, I feel kind of awkward saying, "No, really - just sift through the last half a year of archives and you'll see some great obvservations!" Just a thought - I feel like lots of great thoughts and observations on here just sort of sift away :/
Posted by: Nathan McKenzie | March 03, 2004 at 12:08 AM
At the risk of contributing something useful, use Google. That's what I was told, and it works!
Just put in [site:gamedevleague.blogspot.com "Prince of Persia"] and the likes. Minus the brackets of course, I just used them for clarification.
Posted by: Jeffool | March 03, 2004 at 02:23 AM
As a long time lurker I'll take the chance to say hi and thanks for the blogs on GameDevLeague and the Gamasutra column.
Again, the colour scheme is a massive improvement on this new site. The white-text-on-dark-background never made for the most easy reading experience.
Looking forward to the next blog/article :).
Posted by: Matthew Wiggins | March 03, 2004 at 06:50 AM
Good times. Things are looking good, still hoping you guys get un-crunched soon.
Posted by: Scott Macmillan | March 03, 2004 at 07:54 AM
jamie,
biiig improvement! definitely gotta agree to the other guys (and yeah...especially the comments... ;) mission accomplished then I'd say)...
I'm looking forward to your upcoming entries here on GameDevBlog (although personally I liked gamedevleague... :( )
Posted by: Markus Friedl | March 03, 2004 at 01:17 PM
and yeah.. guess I should probably think about making that move to typepad as well...
Posted by: Markus Friedl | March 03, 2004 at 01:20 PM
V. nice, Jamie. I'm almost convinced about making the switch.
Posted by: Rich Bisso | March 03, 2004 at 05:35 PM
Nobody else has the formatting errors that I do? Odd....
Posted by: Walter | March 04, 2004 at 05:26 PM
I have them to some extent - the sidebar's off by a pixel, and it has those lines. Actually, I kind of like those lines. Maybe that's why I'm not an artist.
Posted by: Jamie Fristrom | March 04, 2004 at 10:36 PM
I could be wrong, but it seems that the 'About Me' link is causing the over-lapping. If you change your font to 'largest' it's offset more than a pixel. So if you dropped it I think you wouldn't have a problem at all.
But that perforated look? I got no clue. Wouldn't look bad at all if it was regular.
Posted by: Jeffool | March 05, 2004 at 12:07 AM
Just realized that the line only occurs next to sidebar titles. Must be a border-right setting.
Posted by: Walter | March 05, 2004 at 12:59 AM